But a decade of restraint to protect the people and win hearts and minds may have made us lose the ability to focus on the objective in fast-moving conventional war:
Recently I received a disturbing email from a retired friend and former colleague who continues to work on military projects. As part of one such project, he found himself involved in building a wargame focused on future capability requirements. The scenario visualized air-landing a light armored force to seize and hold an enemy airfield some distance away.
The senior officer acting as the game's friendly force commander, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, declined to approve the proposed air assault. His objection, in my friend's words, was that, should the air-landed force suffer casualties enroute to its objective, it would have to immediately halt its advance, assume the defensive, wait for help, work to achieve full situational understanding, and fully sort things out in terms of killed and wounded.
My friend pointed out that the hypothesized mission was a major combat operation, not counter-insurgency, and asked whether that didn't alter the commander's priorities. To which he replied, in effect, No, that's not the way we do it now. We wouldn't fight through to the objective. If we have wounded, we have to do everything possible to save their lives. Doesn't matter whether it's COIN or MCO. If a wounded soldier dies, commanders will be held responsible.
Certainly, the needs of counter-insurgency to separate the people from insurgents by protecting the mostly friendly people with restraint in firepower usage was necessary. This made caution and force protection more prized than audacity and calculated risks. Add to that mentality the increasing factor that everything our troops do on the battlefield is recorded by somebody, somewhere on or above the battlefield, which commanders and troops alike can worry will be Exhibit A in their prosecution.
We need a different mindset for what is known as high-intensity warfare. We need to inflict maximum violence on our enemies in the field to break them, pursue them, and gain our objective. Casualties are the price we pay for the mission in such warfare and we have to face that as the price of doing business. Back in 1997, in a paper on the lessons of the opening months of the Iran-Iraq War for our own Army (bizarrely still available here until that piece of hardware from a company I used to use breaks):
Our soldiers' lives are indeed valuable, and our country's insistence that we minimize risks to them is laudable (as well as being necessary due to the small size of the Army). Undue concern, however, is false compassion and, as was the case for Iraq in 1980, could result in even greater casualties in a prolonged war should we refuse--because of the prospects of battle deaths--to seize an opportunity for early victory.
We had to shift gears mentally to go from the high-speed advance that scattered Iraqi resistance in its wake in March and April of 2003 to the slow, plodding counter-insurgency that eventually broke the back of the various resistance groups by 2008. While we must not forget the hard-won lessons of fighting insurgents, we must remember that breaking organized, conventional foes requires a focus on the mission that we must maintain lest we find ourselves counting a lot more of our dead and retreating from a foe that is not confused about their mission.
In conventional warfare, kill them all. Let the JAGs sort it out after we win. Just please find a way to make sure all that battlefield surveillance video isn't discoverable for over-zealous human rights groups that would jail our troops for daring to win a war.
